Effects of Health Care Payment Models on Physician Practice in the United States

By Mark W. Friedberg, et al

This report, sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA), describes how alternative payment models (APMs) affect physicians, physicians’ practices, and hospital systems in the United States and also provides updated data to the original 2014 study. Payment models discussed are core payment (fee for service, capitation, episode-based and bundled), supplementary payment (shared savings, pay for performance, retainer-based), and combined payment (medical homes and accountable care organizations). The effects of changes since 2014 in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and of new alternative payment models (APMs), such as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) Quality Payment Program (QPP), are also examined.

Key Findings

Payment models are changing at an accelerating pace

Physician practices, health systems, and consultants find it difficult to keep up with the proliferation of new models, with some calling for a “time out” to allow them to better adapt to current APMs.

Payment models are increasing in complexity

Alternative payment models have become increasingly complex since 2014. Practices that have invested in understanding complex APMs have found opportunities to earn financial awards for their preexisting quality — without materially changing patient care.

Risk aversion is more prominent among physician practices

Risk aversion among physician practices was more prominent. Risk-averse practices sought to avoid downside risk or to off-load downside risk to partners (e.g., hospitals and device manufacturers) when possible.

There is much more here than a casual glance might imply. The search for value-based payment in health care, as opposed to paying for volume, has led to various payment models such as shared savings, accountable care organizations, bundled payments, pay for performance (P4P), medical homes, and other alternative payment models. How well is that working?

To date, most studies have been quite disappointing. Claims of cost savings are belied when considering the additional provider costs of information technology and human manpower devoted to these models, not to mention the high emotional cost of burnout. This RAND study shows that these models are increasing in complexity, making it difficult for the health delivery system to keep up. Even worse, they are inducing risk aversion. The health care providers are trying to avoid those who most need health care – the opposite of what our health care system should be delivering.

Much of the experimentation in delivery models has been centered around reward or punishment. But, as Alfie Kohn writes, “intrinsic motivation (wanting to do something for its own sake)… is the best predictor of high-quality achievement,” whereas “extrinsic motivation (for example, doing something in order to snag a goody)” can actually undermine intrinsic motivation. It has been observed by others that the personal satisfaction of achievement of patient health care goals is tremendously rewarding, whereas the token rewards based on meager quality measurements are often insulting because of the implication that somehow token payments are a greater motivator than fulfilling Hippocratic traditions. Even more insulting are the token penalties for falling on the wrong side of the bell curve simply as a result of making efforts to care for patients with greater medical or sociological difficulties.

Quoting Alfie Kohn again, “carrots or sticks… can never create a lasting commitment to an action or a value, and often they have exactly the opposite effect … contrary to hypothesis.” The RAND report suggests slowing down and working with these models some more while increasing investment in data management and analysis with the goal of increasing success with alternative payment models. No. These models are making things worse. It’s time to abandon them and get back with taking care of our patients. The payment model we need is an improved version of Medicare that takes care of everyone. Throw out the sticks and carrots.

But however we see it, from the point of view of carrots and sticks as not able to change behavior, or by introducing ever newer models of alternative payments, the end result is the same.

Health care suffers because of the wasteful, bureaucratic, and arbitrary imposition of models that only serve to make life for physicians and hospitals harder, and makes health care more expensive and complex.

As Dr. McCanne says above, throw out the carrots and the sticks. Get rid of the models that don’t work and go to a single payer system that is streamlined and less bureaucratic and arbitrary.

The next post, Challenges Remain in Physician Payment Reform, which followed on the heels of the first, discussed the challenges that remained in reforming physician payment, after then President Barack Obama (the good ole’ days) signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) back in April.

MACRA repealed the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) mechanism of updating fees to the Physician Fee Schedule (PFS), and had been blamed for causing instability and uncertainty among physicians for over a decade, and that led to 17 overrides of scheduled fee cuts, at a cost of over $ 150 billion.

In Models, Models, Have We Got Models!, I suggested, rather strongly that all these models were not living up to their promise and was only creating more complexity, confusion, and dysfunction in an already dysfunctional health care system.

So when I received an email today from Dr. Don McCanne, former president of the Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) that mentioned a press release from Avalere Health indicating that Medicare ACO’s have increased federal spending despite projections that said they would produce net savings.

According to the press release, the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) has performed considerably below the financial estimates from the CBO that was made in 2010 when the MSSP was enacted as part of the ACA.

Avalere’s press release said that this has raised questions about the long-term success of Medicare’s largest alternative payment model (APM).

The MSSP has grown from 27 ACO’s in 2012 to 561 in 2016, and most of them continue to select the upside-only Track 1, the release continued, which does not require participants to repay CMS for spending above their target.

As seen in the figure below, Avalere’s research found that the actual ACO net savings have fallen short of initial CBO projectios by more than $2 billion.

However, in 2010, the CBO projected that the MSSP would produce $1.7 billion in net savings from 2013 to 2016. Yet, it actually increased federal spending by $384 million over that same period, a difference of more than $2 billion.

Josh Seidman, senior vice president at Avalere said, “The Medicare ACO program has not achieved the savings that CBO predicted because most ACO’s have chosen the bonus-only model.”

Avalere also found that while the MSSP was overall a net cost to VMS in 2016, there is evidence that individual ACO performance improves as they gain years of experience. Avalere found that MSSP ACO’s in their fourth year produce net savings to the federal budget totaling $152 million, as shown in the next figure.

Avalere’s analysis also showed that the downside-risk models in the MSSP experienced more positive financial results overall. This indicates that there is potential for greater savings over time to CMS as the number of downside-risk ACO’s increase.

The upside-only model increased federal spending by $444 million compared to the downside-risk ACO’s $60 million over 5 years.

“While data do suggest that more experienced ACO’s and those accepting two-sided risk may help the program to turn the corner in the future, the long-term sustainability of savings in the MSSP is unclear. ACO’s continue to be measured against their past performance, which makes it harder for successful ACO’s to continue to achieve savings over time,” said Avalere’s director, John Feore.

The weird part is that despite the MSSP increasing federal spending, ACO’s are still reducing spending compared to projected benchmarks.

If you are increasing spending, then how can you at the same time be reducing spending? Isn’t this a health care oxymoron?

Which brings me back to my previous posts. CMS is a clusterfudge of programs, models, rules, regulations, and schemes that have done nothing to improve the health care system in the US. In point of fact, it has only added to the confusion, complexity, dysfunction, and wastefulness of a system no other nation has.

When are we going to wake up from this nightmare and deep six the market-driven disaster that is the American health care system? There are saner alternatives, but we are so mentally ill and obsessed with profiting from people’s illnesses that nothing changes.

Einstein was right. The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We are crazy to continue with this mess.

So it comes as no surprise that CMS is unveiling another model for a voluntary bundled payment program.

The unveiling was reported today in FierceHealthcare. com. Called the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BCPI) Advanced model, it is the first model launched by CMS under the current political regime now occupying the White House.

As I have always maintained, the more models, the more complex, confusing and dysfunctional the health care system gets in the US. But it seems CMS never learns, and until the American people stand up to the medical-industrial complex and demand single-payer, damned the torpedoes to their profits and bottom-lines, the better our health care system will get.

Today, someone posted an article about single-payer on LinkedIn and most of the folks who responded did so with negative views about single-payer that indicated that they had drunk the kool-aid fed to them by the medical-industrial complex and their political allies.

They made the claim that countries that have single-payer have seen a decline in care, and that people hate it. So I asked the question, if it is so bad, why aren’t they adopting our system? It is because theirs works.

They don’t have too many models and regulations, and they get great quality of care. Yes, there are problems and they are not perfect systems, but nothing ever is. The truth is we are still the only Western country without single-payer, and CMS’ models are one reason why.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) released a report that stated that there is too much regulation that is impacting patient care.

The report, Regulatory Overload Assessing the Regulatory Burden on Health Systems, Hospitals, and Post-acute Care Providers, concludes with the following assessment:

Health systems, hospitals and PAC providers are besieged by federal regulatory requirements promulgated by CMS, OIG, OCR and ONC, many of which are duplicative and cumbersome and do not improve patient care. In addition to the regulatory burden put forth by those agencies, health systems, hospitals and PAC providers are subject to regulation by additional federal agencies, such as the Department of Labor, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Food and Drug Administration and by state licensing and regulatory agencies. They also operate under stringent contract requirements imposed by payers, such as Medicare Advantage, Medicaid Managed Care plans and commercial payers, which also require reporting data in different ways through different systems. States and payers contribute to burden through, for example, documentation, quality reporting and billing procedures layered on top of the federal requirements.

Regulatory reform aimed at reducing administrative burden must not approach the regulatory environment in a vacuum — evaluating the impact of a single regulation or requirements of a single program — but instead must look at the larger picture of the regulatory framework and identify where requirements can be streamlined or eliminated to release resources to be allocated to patient care.

In a previous post, Models, Models, Have We Got Models!, I said that from the beginning of my foray into the health administration world, I noticed that there were too many models, programs, and schemes dedicated to lowering costs and improving quality of care, that only raised the cost of health care and did not improve quality of care.

This is what I said then about all the models, programs, and rules promulgated by CMS over decades that have not made things better:

The answer was simple. Too many models, programs, rules, and so on that only gum up the works and make real reform not only impossible, but even more remote a possibility as more of these inane models are added to what is already a broken system.

So it seems that I was right even then, and now the AHA has proved it so. Why not scrap these models, programs, and rules and institute real reform…Medicare for All and be done with it?

FierceHealthcare.com today reported that CMS (those lovely folks with all them rules), launched three new policies Tuesday that continue the push toward value-based care, rewarding hospitals that work with physicians and other providers to avoid complications, prevent readmissions and speed recovery.

The newly finalized policies are meant to improve cardiac and orthopedic care, and also create an accountable care organization (ACO) track for small practices, according to the report.

There will be three new cardiac care payment models for hospitals and clinicians who treat patients for heart attacks, heart surgery to bypass blocked coronary arteries, or cardiac rehabilitation following a heart attack or heart surgery.

Federal officials said that the cost of their care…varied by 50% across hospitals and the share of patients readmitted to the hospital within 30 days also varied by 50%. Medicare, the article points out, spent more than $6 billion in 2014 for care provided to 200,000 Medicare patients who were hospitalized for heart attack treatment or underwent bypass surgery.

As for orthopedic care, the new payment model is for physicians and hospitals that provide care to patients who receive surgery after a hip fracture, other than hip replacement.

They also finalized updates to the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model, which began earlier this year.

So far, that’s three models. But wait, there are more where those came from.

These new five-year models provide clinicians with other ways to qualify for a 5% incentive payment through the Advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM) path under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the Quality Payment Program. (three more models — so many, in fact, I am losing count)

Why am I pointing out the problem with the release of new payment models?

I’ll tell you why. When I began my MHA (Masters in Health Administration) degree program, I took an online elective on Healthcare Quality. The textbook we read discussed how CMS over a period of several decades, created and instituted so many models and programs, that it made me wonder why our health care system was so complex, expensive and so out of whack compared to health care systems of other industrialized countries.

The answer was simple. Too many models, programs, rules, and so on that only gum up the works and make real reform not only impossible, but even more remote a possibility as more of these inane models are added to what is already a broken system.

Winston Churchill said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after all the other things were tried. We are still on the trying part, and I am afraid we will never get to where Sir Winston said we would.

Following up on my post yesterday about shared savings, John O’Shea writes today in the Health Affairs blog, that challenges remain with regard to physician payment reform, now that President Obama has signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) in April.

The SGR has been blamed for causing instability and uncertainty among physicians for over a decade, and that led to 17 overrides of scheduled fee cuts, at a cost of over $ 150 billion.

The passage of MACRA, O’Shea wrote, raises new questions about where the US health care system is headed in the post-SGR world of payment and delivery reform.

Yet, before MACRA was signed into law, HHS Secretary Burwell announced a major initiative calling for 30 % of Medicare payments to be value-based through the use of alternative payment models (APMs) by 2016, and 50% by 2018.

HHS also set a goal of tying 85% of all traditional Medicare payments to quality or value by 2016, and 90% by 2018.

O’Shea reported there are reasons for caution. These policy changes, following calls to move from the current volume-based, fee-for-service (FFS) system to a value-based system that pays for patient outcomes, rather than for individual services, present major challenges to achieving the goal of value-based health care, the goal of any real health reform initiative.

One of the APMs O’Shea discussed is Value-based purchasing (VBP), which is the concept behind APMs, includes a broad set of performance-based payment strategies that attempt to use financial incentives to influence provider performance, such as the Shared Savings Program mentioned yesterday.

Another APMs is the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) [don’t you just love how the government comes up with these abbreviations?], a modified FFS system, which is basically a Pay-for-Performance (P4P) program.

The overall early results of these initiatives, as well as possible flaws, make the long term viability of these models uncertain.

With regard to P4P programs, a 2014 RAND report looked at 49 studies examining the effect of P4P on process and intermediate outcome measures, and found that the overall results were mixed, and that any identified effects were relatively small.

According to the lead author of the study, Cheryl Damberg, “The evidence from the past decade is that pay for performance had modest effects on closing the quality gap.” A basic flaw in the model is the reality that meaningful patient-centered outcome measures remain elusive.

ACOs, as I wrote about yesterday, are another APM; and O’Shea reported that their ability to generate savings to share with participants is so far not encouraging. He points to early results from the Pioneer ACO program that determined that of the 23 ACOs that participated in 2013, only 11 earned any shared savings, which totaled about $41 million. Six ACOs lost a total of $25 million. The results from a similar study in 2014 showed improvement, but the long-term outlook is still unclear.

What is the impact on the practice of medicine?

What O’Shea found was that physicians currently labor under an increasingly burdensome and often meaningless number of reporting requirements that take time away from patients, and fail to help them improve quality of care.

Accordingly, a commentary O’Shea cited from the New England Journal of Medicine said that, “the quality-measurement enterprise in US health care is troubled.”

A recent CMS report, O’Shea mentioned, said that 40% of Medicare providers will face 1.5% cuts for failing to submit data to the Physician Quality Reporting System.

Because of this, many public and private payers are tying larger amounts of provider payments to a growing number of largely meaningless measures.

O’Shea said that there are two areas of concern, given the plethora of payment and delivery reform initiatives: the administrative burden on physicians, and the push towards greater consolidation.

Nearly half, or 46% of doctors who reported said that they felt burned out in 2014. A main reason cited by the physicians was the increasing administrative burden.

What does the mean?

Well, having slogged through an online Health Care Quality course as part of my MHA degree program, the myriad abbreviations mentioned in Mr. O’Shea’s article does not surprise me. CMS and HHS has for years developed all kinds of initiatives and programs to influence and alter behavior of all stakeholders in our health care system.

As “Uncle” Walter Cronkite once said, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” And that was before the passage of the ACA.

But for the purposes of this blog, and in keeping with the point of the last article where it was said that what happens in health care affects workers’ comp. then I think you can agree that these initiatives and programs, while well-meaning, may make things worse in the future, but not because the idea behind the ACA or the law itself is bad, but because we Americans cannot do anything right until we try everything else, a la Winston Churchill.

If that is the case, then believing that by doing the same things over and over again, that by following everyone else off the cliff of unregulated, employer-based, multi-payer health care, and by not opening the workers’ comp system to real alternatives, especially for surgery, then nothing will ever change.

We will continue to see more new initiatives and programs from CMS, and the results will be dismal, and the impact on workers’ comp will be felt eventually. That is, unless you open up your minds to new ways of thinking.

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I am willing to work with any broker, carrier, or employer interested in saving money on expensive surgeries, and to provide the best care for their injured workers or their client’s employees.

Quotes

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

– Muhammad Ali

“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small..”

– Azim Premji

“Those who say your dreams are ridiculous have given up on theirs.”

– Unknown

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

– Thomas Carlyle

“As the work is done for the employer, and therefore ultimately for the public, it is a bitter injustice that it should be the wage-worker himself and his wife and children who bear the whole penalty.”

– President Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing.

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1908

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith

“Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges… which are employed altogether for their benefit.”

– Andrew Jackson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

– Abraham Lincoln

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

– Karl Marx

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, NOT on fighting the old, but on BUILDING the NEW.”

– Socrates

“Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

– Winston Churchill

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

– Robin Williams

“There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

– John Stuart Mill

“The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health [care] is the most shocking and inhuman[e]…”